High Desert is Apple’s poor response to Peacock’s Poker Face. While both shows share a similar premise, High Desert lacks the charm to make it successful. Instead of a quirky and fun journey through America, you get an unremarkable staycation in a sleepy desert town no one cares about. Whatever quirks this series tries to have made the series impossible to enjoy. While it may not be the worst thing Apple has done to us, it isn’t good either.
Peggy has led an impulsive life full of bad decisions and chaos. After the death of her mother, she decides to live a more productive life. She tries to quit drugs, becomes a private investigator, and tries to cut out the bad influences in her life. The problem is that Peggy has tried to reform several times but always falls back to her old ways. Will this be the new chapter in her life she keeps saying it will be, or will this be another of Peggy’s empty promises?
This series is droning spastic series of events that grow unmanageably chaotic because the plot needs them to. The harder Peggy tries to do good, the more she makes it harder for people around her. By the end of her journey, she is still the same character, but now she’s created a mess even she might not be able to control. High Desert is a jumbled mess of unfinished plot points connected unrealistically by a single character, and it doesn’t work. It needed a lot more focus and a more charming character.
Peggy is a selfish and frustrating character. I commend the actress for having fun with the role, but I couldn’t stand Peggy by the end. She sucks. Peggy is supposed to be a smart lovable loser so that the audience can overlook her general shadiness. Instead, it’s grueling to watch her move between her droning monologues full of lies as she makes things worse. They try to play it off like Peggy is the way she is because she loves it so much, but I don’t see it. It sucks to follow a character that can move through adversity easily and learns nothing from her journey. Not that anything happens during this journey.
Most of the plot that exists in this series doesn’t matter. There is too much going on to cover in one go, but a lot of it only exists to spark moments of dialogue. Many of the plot points go unfinished and forgotten, others overstay their welcome, and some of them don’t make sense. All this unregulated chaos builds to a cliffhanger that only made me realize how much time I wasted on this series. Maybe the show was building to an eventful second season, but I don’t care enough to find out. Despite all the chaos, nothing remarkable ever happens.
The problem with this series isn’t that it is bad, there are worse shows out the. The problem is that there are better things you could be watching instead. High Desert is an unremarkable series with quirks that will probably annoy more than they entertain. If you watch this series, you won’t remember what you did. You can stream it on Apple if you have a membership, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to watch it.